Attacking and Exploiting Public Transportation System Location Services

Saeed Hasanzadeh Asl¹ Maryam Alizadeh²

1) Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran Email:
2) Bachelor of Science in Information Technology Engineering, Azarbayjan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran Email:

Publication : 4th International Congress on Engineering, Technology and Applied Science - Auckland University of Technology(etas2019.com)
Abstract :
We present two attacks against social location based services: (a) An effective Sybil attack aimed at creating fake congestion and influencing benign user routing (b) A privacy targeted attack that allows tracking fellow users movement over a desired area and time frame. Both our attacks are based on creating a large number of “bot drivers”, and controlling their reported locations using fake GPS reports. We applied our attacks to WAZE a prominent social navigation application used by over 50 million drivers. We show that our first attack can fake traffic jams and dramatically influence routing decisions, and that our second attack effectively tracks users. We present several techniques for preventing the attacks, and show that effective mitigation likely requires the use of additional carrier information for the first attack, and removing fellow user location reporting altogether for the second attack.
Keywords : GPS Driver Traffic Attack Social Navigation